Word: voyeurs
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...second week, Survivor won hands down. By the third week--when Regis Philbin, monochrome outfit in tatters, slunk away to lick his wounds, leaving Two Guys and a Girl and Norm to take his butt whuppin' for him--Survivor had ballooned into the biggest TV success since the last voyeur-vision landmark: Fox's gift to late-night comedians, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Which--we know, we know--you didn't watch...
Something strange is happening in television: the rise of VTV, voyeur television. Despite Survivor's gross-outs, its dark premise and its wall-to-wall cheesiness--the faux-Lion King sound track, the "tribal councils" held in what looks like a Holiday Inn Polynesian lounge circa 1963, the somber narration of Jeff Probst, former host of VH1's Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy! and challenger to Regis for luckiest-man-in-America status--despite all this, viewers have embraced the desert-island soap with fascination and bemused contempt. Does Dirk have a crush on Kelly? Will Ramona throw up again...
...something perhaps even stranger is happening: through a sudden explosion of new-wave voyeur shows, ordinary people are becoming our new celebrities. Following Multi-Millionaire's Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell, there's now Stacey Stillman, 27, Survivor's cranky attorney ("I never realized how annoyed I looked," she says. "I was hungry"). There's Julie (last name withheld for security reasons), 20, the Mormon naif in the just-premiered ninth season of MTV's The Real World, in which this year's crew of twentysomethings find romance and hurt feelings while sharing a New Orleans mansion. There's Joyce...
...series let older-skewing CBS woo youngsters, introduced to voyeur shows by The Real World in 1992 (Season 9, in New Orleans, airs this summer). "We're seeing Real World copied, but we're not getting any royalties," jokes co-creator Jonathan Murray of Bunim/Murray Productions, which is currently developing reality programs for ABC. In one, the network plans to create an online magazine and "cast" journalists both to write for the magazine and to star in the show...
...Leslie Moonves admits that a psychologist friend has encouraged him not to go through with these voyeur shows. While he has not pulled the shows from the summer lineup, he has ordered additional screenings of potential contestants. Applicants must endure a battery of psychological and physical endurance tests, but who can really predict what will happen under conditions that are, to say the least, adverse? The German TV execs acknowledged this, and set up a "safe room" in their "Big Brother" house, where the contestants can meet with a psychologist without the pressure of the cameras and microphones...